AMD announces plans to open up ATI graphics drivers

It looks like AMD's trying to make some friends in the open source community, with it today announcing some new drivers for Linux along with some details on its plans to open up its drivers to the community at large. Set to be released later this month, the new Catalyst 7.9 software will add Linux support for the ATI Radeon HD 2000 series of graphics processors, along with other "major performance improvements across the board," which it says should result in a "90 per cent improvement in such popular titles as Doom 3 and Quake 4." What's more, AMD also reportedly took advantage of this week's Kernel Summit to announce a fairly major push to go open source with its drivers. As part of that initiative, AMD will apparently work with the open source community develop a 2D and 3D driver that supports all the latest Radeon chipsets, and it'll even release documentation to let anyone (with the necessary skills) build some drivers from scratch. According to blogger Christopher Blizzard, however, that will apparently be a rather slow process, with the documentation for the 2D drivers coming first, and the 3D docs coming some time after that. Still, we're guessing that there's quite a few folks that now know what they'll be doing with their free time for the foreseeable future.


Read - AMD Press Release
Read - Christopher Blizzard, "A new road for AMD and ATI"

[Via LWN.net]

[Dang Nguyen Duc @ Sep 6th 2007 2:59AM]

AMD/ATI is cool again

[taco @ Sep 6th 2007 3:14AM]

If they make good on this promise I'll be switching back to ATI cards again, being primarily an ubuntu user nowdays

[Boobo @ Sep 6th 2007 3:42AM]

I wonder what this will mean for the OSX86 project. It'll also be interesting to see if it forces nVidia's hand to do keep up the pace in the transparency gig.

[paul @ Sep 6th 2007 4:18AM]

Just to add my voice to the crowd. Just this announcement alone is probably enough to make me look toward ATI for the card I'm buying now.

[Generic @ Sep 6th 2007 4:53AM]

now I can write my own OS along with decent graphics drivers

[coarse.sand @ Sep 6th 2007 4:57AM]

Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. Someone please fix my Xpress 200m and make Ubuntu fun my computer again.

[paris @ Sep 6th 2007 8:17AM]

So someone working in his free time will be able to do a better job than the paid and highly trained employees at AMD/ATI ?

[jimmyfinch @ Sep 6th 2007 8:36PM]

uh...Yes

highly trained does not equal highly capable.

[James @ Sep 7th 2007 11:30AM]

The bigger issue is that "someone working in their spare time" is a lot more likely to have access to the same problematic combination of hardware (your CPU/motherboard/weird addon card) than the "highly trained professionals" at ATI, simply because there are a lot more people matching the former description. The result is that if you experience buggy behavior, the random grad student dude from Sweden who happens to have the *same* problem is a lot more likely to fix it, and fix it quicker, than one of ATI's tens of programmers.

[zero @ Sep 6th 2007 8:46AM]

Will this performance increase be across the board on Windows and Linux, or just on Linux? I can't get that from the article?

[moe @ Sep 6th 2007 8:55AM]

doesn't this scream "we are so screwed help us build drivers or we will fall further behind"?

[scottjl @ Sep 6th 2007 9:03AM]

let's hope this pushes nvidia to do the same.

[strider_mt2k @ Sep 6th 2007 9:15AM]

'bout time!

They need to clear all those ATI cards out of eBay!

[andy @ Sep 6th 2007 9:50AM]

> So someone working in his free time will be able to do a better job than the paid and highly trained employees at AMD/ATI ?

Why not? People working in their free time have been doing a better job than the "paid and high trained employees" at Microsoft.

[Brian @ Sep 6th 2007 9:57AM]

Just to be clear this is NOT for "all the latest Radeons", but actually ONLY FOR the LATEST Radeons:

"...open source drivers for all of its (ATI) graphics processors from the R500 going forward."

http://lwn.net/Articles/248227/

R500 (at least according to Wiki, the R520) series means all the Radeon X1000+ Series. So this takes out all the 9x00's, which I assume many people still have.

[Ken @ Sep 6th 2007 1:47PM]

@ Brian

Yes, but this is a very good start.

Huzzah!

[Ayle @ Sep 6th 2007 11:02AM]

At last!

[kojo87 @ Sep 6th 2007 4:12PM]

well if it can amp up my X1650PRO i'll be ecstatic. it will also greatly influence my purchase of a HD2900XT in the future.

well done ATI. i new you weren't dead yet!

[Valgas @ Sep 7th 2007 3:44AM]

Time for some haxtion!